vendredi 17 février 2017

Huawei is Reportedly Working on Their Own Personal Assistant

If you haven’t noticed by now, personal assistants are all the rage at the moment. We had Google Now for years, which graduated to Google Assistant just recently. There’s Cortana from Microsoft, Siri from Apple, Alexa from Amazon and there’s even talks of Bixby being the a personal assistant from Samsung. This week, a new report surfaced from Bloomberg that claims Huawei is working on their own personal assistant feature as well.

Many would hope that Huawei would just stick with Google Assistant once it becomes available on other devices (remember, the LG G6 is said to have it), and that will likely happen as well. This report cites “people familiar with the matter,” and there are supposedly a team of about 100 engineers that are working on the project. Huawei’s personal assistant, at least at this time, will not be widely available to everyone with a Huawei device.

Instead, the report claims they will only be using it for their domestic customers in China. The assistant would communicate in Chinese languages and it’s said Huawei will continue to work with Google and Amazon in markets outside of China. This makes a ton of sense for Huawei too since they’re one of the biggest smartphone OEMs in China. Rolling out their own personal assistant feature to those customers could go a long way to attract a bigger share in the region.

Huawei refuses to comment on the story and this means that information about the project is limited. We don’t know the extent to which they’re willing to take this feature if they end up being satisfied with the results. It could be made only available on the company’s smartphones, or they could release products like Google Home and the Amazon Echo. We’ll just have to wait and see what Huawei comes up with and if it helps keep their momentum going in China.